People always seem to pity me for my birthday.

It’s two days after Christmas, which tends to make people assume that, at best, all my gifts come wrapped in red and green paper or, at worst, I’m overlooked entirely. What I have to explain is that because I’m an only child and grew up with relatively few kids even in my extended family, my birthday probably would have been treated like a monumental event even if it had fallen right on Christmas.

So no, at least for a spoiled only child, a Dec. 27 birthday isn’t bad — unless there’s something to some research published recently in The Wall Street Journal. According to the article “New Light on the Plight of Winter Babies,” “children born in the winter months already have a few strikes against them. Study after study has shown that they test poorly, don’t get as far in school, earn less, are less healthy and don’t live as long as children born at other times.”

Wow. If this is true, we winter babies might have more to worry about than having our birthdays overshadowed by the holiday season. So I decided to give some thought to the suggestions given in the story as to why people born in the winter are more likely to fare poorly, and to get others’ input on the issue, as well.

One thing I found was that, although it seems to be generally accepted among researchers that winter babies are more likely to face certain struggles, the phenomenon isn’t so overwhelming as to be noticeable to everyone. Jo Deshon, principal at Eugene Field Elementary School in St. Joseph, says she found the article in The Wall Street Journal very interesting but can’t see the trend to be true among her relatively small number of students.

“Maybe if I had a larger sample of students to analyze, I would see a pattern,” she adds.

Still, even among researchers who have had sample sizes large enough to see the trend, explaining it hasn’t come easy. An explanation given by some economists all the way back in the early ‘90s, for example, was that because children born in the winter reach their 16th birthdays earlier in the school year than other children, they can legally leave school sooner, thereby rendering some of them less educated and less able to compete in the job market. This would explain why people born in the winter tend to earn less, the economists postulated.

An obviously weak point of this explanation, of course, is that logically, it being true would mean that people born in late summer or fall — at the beginning of the school year — would be just as likely to fare poorly as people born in the winter. But evidently statistics don’t support this. And an argument by other researchers that I think is faulty for the same reason (not to mention that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in general): “Maybe being put in the same school year with children who are mostly younger makes children born in the winter less socially mature.”

Possible explanations that make a little more sense to me are that children born in the winter get less vitamin D early in life and have higher birth-defect rates due to a higher concentration of pesticides in surface water during the spring and summer, when they were conceived.

But the explanation that was the reason for the article in The Wall Street Journal — the “new light” teased in its headline — is a discovery that the percentage of children born to unwed mothers, teenage mothers and mothers who haven’t completed high school is highest in the winter. This trend seems to explain why children born in the winter are more likely to do poorly, because children born into poverty and to uneducated parents are more likely than others to have lower education and earning levels, according to the economists who made the discovery.

This reasoning makes more sense to me than the explanations given above, and the connection between a child’s family background and his future success is one that also resonates with Jerry Kuckelman, county attorney for Atchison (Kan.) County.

Although he was a fall baby — born in October — and the youngest in his class since he skipped kindergarten and started first grade at age 5, Mr. Kuckelman doesn’t attribute any of his accomplishments to his birthday or the fact that he wouldn’t have been able to drop out of school as soon as his classmates.

Rather, “I think the nature of your family is the bigger issue,” he says. “Education is huge and family is huge, and you learn from your family.”

He adds that he’s not sure becoming a lawyer counts as a success, noting with a laugh that his grandfather would say it doesn’t. But he says, too, that his grandfather somehow ended up with multiple lawyer grandchildren — something else that might point to how much influence family can have.

As for what influences a noteworthy percentage of young, uneducated and/or poor women to have babies in the winter, researchers can only speculate. Maybe it has something to do with the cooler weather in the spring, they say, which wouldn’t adversely affect fertility for couples who can’t afford air conditioning, like summer temperatures might. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that high school proms tend to fall nine months before the dead of winter, the article in The Wall Street Journal notes.

Whatever the case may be, I still say a winter birthday isn’t necessarily a sentence to a less-than-successful life — any more than it’s a sentence to birthday gifts wrapped in red and green.

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached at ewisdom@npgco.com.